Words without a Face
by omgpink
Summary: Ikebukuro is a concrete jungle, a booming city of doom. How many stories fill its nooks and crannies? This is a one-shot collection listed under characters of the most recent shot. No Yaoi.
1. Words without a Face

**WORDS WITHOUT A FACE  
**_A shot for Izaya Orihara and Rio Kamichika  
_

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**

Rio never sought him out. She never notified the police. She never looked him up in the phone book. Her own pink cell was cold metal in her hands. She simply opened her contacts list the next day, scrolled down to 'N.'

Nakura.

View.

Erase.

And the miniature dumpster appeared and that teeny tiny ball of paper flew into it, a gentle arc. Then, the whole image disappeared, melding into her wallpaper, pink as her device. _Pink as the red splotched pavement. _Once, they were Siamese twins of suffering. Everything he said:

She was good.

She was in the right.

Her parents _were fucked up as hell._

Ending it all. That made sense.

Behind that LED screen, he drew eloquent little circles, pulling her closer, and that night, her cold pink face tilted downward.

He said, she had come. He said, she was here to die. But, well, it was his face she wanted to see. The one behind the emails, the one behind the computer screen. The one just like hers. She saw him every lunch in her pretty pink cell phone. The shine of her father's glasses. Text messages. Sweet, sweet words.

_I'm a guy who wants to disappear without a trace._

Words without a face.

Words without a face.

_Insert coins here.  
_

Rio opened the washing machine and transferred her towels and sheets to the side-loading dryer below. The laundromat was quiet, but then again, it was always quiet. The bumbling machines, minding their own business, vibrated on the floor. She finally rested on one of the chairs and pulled out her cell phone, a luscious model, to shoot a text to her fiancé.

Rio:  
I'll be late.

Sent.

An animated envelope grew cute little wings and flew away.

He would be aggravated that she took so long, but today, Rio had forgotten her coins at the apartment and had to take two trips. The world was unpredictable like that. So when the door tinkled open and a fur trimmed coat sat down next to her, crossing his legs toward her saying, "Miss Magenta, Hi—" her head didn't turn a stiff ninety degrees in surprise. She didn't wheel around or flop backwards, a victim to the dragon of fate. Big city. Small world.

Rio lifted her eyes to him, protectively flipping her cell phone shut. "—You are wondering what I have." He leaned in, smiling with secrets, his hair tickling her cheek. It had, indeed, been a while.

"Uhh," she breathed at the closeness. Long ago, she had erased Nakura from her contacts list. This Izaya replaced him. He was a cat fond of leaving headless mice next to her pillow, sitting patiently beside her til she opened her eyes, and then scooting back into the wild backyard that was Ikebukuro's piss-filled streets. Today, Izaya was at the laundromat to dig up an old carcass and taste the fresh rot.

The informant met Rio's eyes, licking his lips and snaking an arm around the back of her chair. The woman, grown into her late twenties, held her ground. She was a different woman from those years past, when she met him on the rooftop. She had hardened in some places, softened in others. Mostly hardened. _Because the world isn't as cruel as you take it to be._ It wasn't cruel. Just indifferent. The black-coated man before her, whether cruel or indifferent, never made her feel good. He snatched her wrist and pulled it up to their line of vision. "I see your ring," he paused, letting the words hang dry in the air,"is nice. He got a good deal?" Rio pulled her hand away, almost slapping him across the face.

And an empty seat quickly found its way between them.

"Can you forgive him?"

She almost, _almost_ ignored him.

"Everyone has secrets," she blurted and they were silent for a while. She twisted her engagement ring, making a promise to it. He watched, transfixed the way a person determines if his coin hit the bottom of the wishing well or if it was still falling. He grinned, remembering falling things, remembering the crunching sound against _red splotched pavement. _Then he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a singular white envelope.

"Miss Magenta," laughter, edging on maniac.

"You are thinking this information will change nothing. You are thinking," he was all coquettish, know-it-all smiles, "you're sweet enough and good enough to forget it all." He traced the envelope in the air like a music conductor's baton. "You think you can keep laughing and eating those delicious dinners after this. And you know, that would be unlike you."

"You don't know me." But Izaya just stopped his little musical composing, froze the song, finished the spell. Smug as a potted plant.

"Then take it, and make your own conclusions." Rio didn't take the envelope. She had no intention of touching it. It would be cruel to touch it. And he was laughing as she shoved her hands between her knees, reduced to a little girl.

"You're so pathetic. You can't face the truth," and she remembered how quickly she had opened the first envelope.

He was egging her on. Just egging her on.

"_Predictable._"

She stiffened, and then, those little lines appeared under her eyes and around her mouth, the kind that appear when her smile is forced. This time, she didn't even have to smile for them to appear. Rio took a side-ways glance and scanned him up and down, every inch of his lax posture, his sharp, obtrusive nose, reminding her of something she wished she could forget, but the whirlpool of her mind spun too fast. Everything hung in her tired, tired eyes. Ideas, suspicions, little rats hidden behind the walls, made their noises, their squeaking and their scratching. For the white envelope. Rio reached for it, nothing quick, but a hand lifting up. He pulled it away, and she looked even more tired at him, while he grinned. Only he could hold something horrible away as if it were a dog treat.

"That expression, hold it," and she blushed, but was still motivated.

"What is it?" She reached across the seat for her envelope, but he grabbed her wrist again and tugged her thin frame over the chair that separated them. One of her hands steadied itself on his shirt and one of his came to control her shoulder.

"Are you sure, now?" He was still derisive as ever, still full of snotty pride. Full of some sort of inside joke.

"Yes." And his hands fell off. There was no velcro between them, after all, just enough craziness to hold her above the edge of a building and just enough sanity to pull her back. He was a man of 'show and tell.' Izaya handed it over for real this time. She took it and tore open the end like a drunk swigging from his last bottle, alone with nothing but a streetlamp and those dancing moths. The pictures slid onto her hand and she sat down next to him. Izaya leaned over, hands on his knees, ready to watch a good show.

Good, it was.

Her fiancé wasn't just holding the woman's hand, guiding her into a restaurant. Or a motel. She understood his joke now.

"He sets up, oh, you've heard of them." _  
_

Izaya delicately swayed left and right, left and right, soaking in the way her eyes shifted across the photographs. She wanted to rub her thumb over that captured face, clean off the dirt to make sure it was him, but there was no dirt, no dirt at all. She couldn't hide the pain from the man twirling his hair this whole time, devouring the sight of her. This information, this truth, was supposed to hurt. But she wanted nothing more than to refuse him payment. Refuse the tears.

"Yes, I have," she confessed as it cut a straight line from her eye to her chin.

"It took you a while this time."

Like biting back vomit already in her mouth. The dryer beeped, finished, but she didn't get up. His cool index finger pressed onto her cheek and Rio batted it away. Nakura—Izaya—rubbed his forefinger and thumb together, feeling the moisture, a man biting a coin. That jester's smile.

"Yeah, it's nice to see your face again."

Rio only stared into the photograph, making up her mind, making up her mind, making up her mind in so many different ways, a bed changed 365 times a year. _Because the world isn't as cruel as you take it to be_, never uttered, never spread, stuck like a flock of butterflies in a glass jar. And thus, it started all over again.

"Nakura-san," and the name felt right in her mouth like something familiar and old, something to go back to, an old home. Because as much as Nakura was fake, Izaya was real and tangible, and a cousin of a memory.


	2. Hide your Neck

**HIDE YOUR NECK  
**_A shot for Masaomi Kida and Izaya Orihara_

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_

Masaomi Kida knew a lot first-hand. He knew to kiss the girls by the fountain in the park. He knew to avoid the tourist traps bouncing with Polaroid cameras and lip-peeling smiles. Maps were engraved in his head like a mouse maze; he had that cute cunning.

Most importantly, Kida knew that Ikebukuro, in its poison bright neon scales, was a nest of danger. He knew this as well as any over-protective mother, as wisely as any hound-dog cop, as clearly as any security camera. Yellow was for the sick kid he dragged home from drinking out behind skids and for the dirty-pissed on towels by the trashcans. It smelled like weed and meth. He could rub his sweatshirt sleeve on his nose, and then smile at the boys at his back. The numbers at his back. He threw his scarf over his shoulder and jumped into the street.

In Ikebukuro, if a necklace was worth anything, it would be yanked off—he had seen it happen to a girl's gold chain on the subway. And while the girl heaved in fear, clutching a ratty handbag, Kida, alone, kept his hood up and his hands in his pockets, wondering if he would relate this to Mikado.

The train came to a halt. The boy stepped over that cavity between the train and the station with lanky ease. How many old ladies had fallen in that darkness? His eyes caught the hooking gaze of beggars sitting on the ground with coffee cups and brown hats. If Mikado were here, he would have dropped his subway change into them, would have winked karma over his shoulder as the coins slide from his palms.

But the blond walked on past, enmeshed into the crowd, that mustard scarf so bright against the black coats that decorate the business district. On this side of town, the buildings rose black with yellow lights in the windows. The sunbeams barely made it through the smog. The sidewalk was wide. The street was wider. Gold paint embroidered each building's address. Masaomi rolled his eyes over the numbers the city's money funneled into. Numbers numbers, power in numbers. Real estate, banking, stocks. And his gang played monopoly with the squares surrounding the train stations. Pass go, collect the innards of a mail box.

Kida finally turned into the parking garage. He walked up the ramps. It was a lazy hour. The ramp was empty. Up he climbed the cement pathway, the world as cold inside this high-rise as in any basement. Eight levels up, he climbed. Broken green glass reflected the red exit sign underneath the door out to the roof.

Masaomi Kida valued information, he valued his mouse maze mind. Information, it got him out of a lot of tight places. He had that in common with the informant, on a more subtle level. They both had holes in their eyes, Izaya's were just blacker. More lonely. So Kida opened the door into the wind and stepped onto the roof.

Izaya smiled and pushed the hair out of his eyes as if he never left this temple of cars. "I take it you have what I asked for."

"Yeah, I've got it."

"Trouble?"

Masaomi was silent. He liked the way it felt to be a bug under a rock, hiding in the city's masses. At this height, a wind tunnel made it hard to breath.

He tossed a package wrapped in brown paper to the informant. "The trouble doesn't matter." Izaya shook it next to his ear and then put it away. "You know, I always liked you Kida-chan." Izaya walked like Kida, slow and contemplative, hands in his pockets, hunching his back to emphasize his thin frame. "Like a little prince. And the ambition, it cracks me up!" Izaya put his arm around him. "H-hey!"

"A little young to be a top dog?"

"…a little old… to be wearing a v-neck?" Izaya laughed maniacally. Kida stepped to the side.

"All right. All right." Izaya waved his hand up and down. "Here you go, knock yourself out. I don't get why you want the answers to the exam."

"I applied to Raika."

"Oh really? I'll toast to that."

Mikado liked grape juice. They would eat that at lunch together. Kida turned on his heel suddenly, but Izaya already had his binoculars out, studying the river of people.

"I'm done with the gangs."

"Any particular reason?"

"It's not fun anymore," he shrugged. Izaya looked at him for a few seconds, then lowered his head back down to the streets. Kida left the informant up in his cement fortress to twiddle with his cell phone, selling the news, giggling about the package.

On the sidewalk, Kida removed his scarf and stuffed it into his messenger bag. The manila envelope was too big, so he carried it under his arm. The train station was around the block. He dropped some change into a Styrofoam cup, stood next to a cute girl, and let a song get stuck in his head. He deleted some numbers from his cell phone. He sent two text messages. When he saw two boys get on, he squeezed out before the doors closed and caught the next line. He would be home soon.


End file.
